My guess is that if the entire archive became public, a number of institutional and individual names in "journalism" would be greatly compromised. It's probably a huge archive--the semi unfiltered musings of a self selecting group of "influentials."

The biggest parallel I see here is Climategate. These guys and gals will not release this archive on their own, since they know they will look bad.

Interesting, though, that the downside of their clubbiness is just now occurring to them.

"The mainstream media needs to return to high principles of neutral, professional journalism." They can't return to a place you've never been. They cannot be something they have never been. Was Walter Cronkite fair? Or would an Obama voter be more inclined to think Walter Duranty was the model of fair and balanced reporting? Were William Randolph Hearst's reporters fair? Who got it right?

A3. Protecting Our Neutrality35. Staff members and those on assignment for us may not accept anything that could be construed as a payment for favorable coverage or for avoiding unfavorable coverage. They may not accept gifts, tickets, discounts, reimbursements or other benefits such as promises to be your best friend forever from individuals or organizations covered (or likely to be covered) by their newsroom. Gifts should be returned with a polite explanation; perishable gifts may instead be given to charity, also with a note to the donor. In either case the objective of the note is, in all politeness, to discourage future gifts and promises to be your best friend forever.

1a. The Professor's telephones must be tapped, in order to put her blog posts into context. In fact, all intra-Meadehouse communications must be recorded and posted to the internet as a daily podcast, for the same reason.

3. The mainstream media needs to return to high principles of neutral, professional journalism.

Well the #1 cable news outlet in America routinely alters, and edits actual news events. Like turning up Howard Dean's scream, and removing applause for the President while speaking to the military. Oh that's right, you mean only journalists you think are liberal should disclose and report fairly. How could I be so stupid.

"1a. The Professor's telephones must be tapped, in order to put her blog posts into context. In fact, all intra-Meadehouse communications must be recorded and posted to the internet as a daily podcast, for the same reason."

"Well the #1 cable news outlet in America routinely alters, and edits actual news events. Like turning up Howard Dean's scream, and removing applause for the President while speaking to the military. Oh that's right, you mean only journalists you think are liberal should disclose and report fairly. How could I be so stupid."

Sure, but nothing is hidden. We're free to refute and reject that. I'm arguing for more information out in the open, a marketplace of ideas. We're all free to switch away from Fox. By the same token, when the Journolist archive is available, you don't have to read it.

"The Professor's telephones must be tapped, in order to put her blog posts into context. In fact, all intra-Meadehouse communications must be recorded and posted to the internet as a daily podcast, for the same reason."

Explain why you think that's the same. Our family communications were not part of a commercial enterprise to control information to the public. My proposal to release the Journolist archive doesn't depend on secret monitoring. Anyone who has the archive -- anyone of 400 persons -- is free to upload it to the web or to send it to me so it can be read. So that's like if Meade or I for some reason wanted to write publicly about our relationship.

Really? Seems to me most of all of it is hidden, we only see the finished product. Don't you want to see who and what FOX employees are emailing around to other? Kruathammer [employee of WaPo] recently said they "invent their own reality" at FOX.

6. Journolist members delberately deceived the public by maintaining a pretense of independence while in fact coordinating coverage in secret among multiple news sources. They wanted the public to believe in something that ws not true.

6. The members of Journolist need to publicly identify themselves so that readers can more accurately appraise their work. Their employers need to make clear their policy with repect to their employees engaging in secret collaborations to manipulate the news.

Really? Seems to me most of all of it is hidden, we only see the finished product. Don't you want to see who and what FOX employees are emailing around to other?

Sure, but Fox is one network. Even if they promote something bogus or bury a legit story, they can't control the narrative of their competitors.

But how do we know if the NYTimes, WashPost, HuffPo, CBS, et al. are burying something in concert? We won't. It'll just show up on WND and be laughed off as "not credible in the eyes of the mainstream media."

And if Fox is in deed colluding with other outlets to control stories, sure I want to know all about it. Don't you?

Well the #1 cable news outlet in America routinely alters, and edits actual news events. Like turning up Howard Dean's scream, and removing applause for the President while speaking to the military. Oh that's right, you mean only journalists you think are liberal should disclose and report fairly. How could I be so stupid.

Perfect example of someone who puts ideology & 'advancing the ball for his team' ahead of truth.

Our family communications were not part of a commercial enterprise to control information to the public.

Was that was Journolist was? To me it was the equivalent of a journalists' bar, where they felt free to let their hair down and complain -- a bit like General McChrystal hanging out with his staff after hours. But unlike a bar, being asynchronous and spread out over the world, Journolist had to rely on recorded comments and responses.

In general I believe private communications should stay private unless there is some public policy reason not to. (So I don't really advocate pillow talk podcasts even if the general rule 5. "The presumption should always be in favor of more information" holds.) But as I understand it, the only person who could benefit from putting his remarks in context is this David Weigel fellow.

"Notice the snarks coming out to attack you? I think you are really getting to them with this. Kick ass."

Actually, no. I don't go looking to see who's hating on me today. I do what I think is right and let the chips fall where they may. If I'm wrong, they will overcome me. If I'm right, perhaps I will have influence.

I note that on this one, I don't have to convince everyone or even a majority. I just need 1 person who is in possession of the archive to agree with me. And I think I'm right, so I believe that the information will break free.

6. All journalists are equal, but they're not more equal than non-journalists and conservatives.

7. If you aren't mature enough to control your temper or at least keep your immature emotions to yourself, you shouldn't be working in journalism. Go do something else and vent your spleen by blogging.

8. There should be no forum or list where anyone feels "safe" in posting insults, slurs, smears or rants he/she wouldn't be comfortable publishing.

Journolist corrupted the essence of free speech by controlling and manipulating the marketplace of ideas.

When everyone has the same access to information as everyone else, when people post their journalism on youtube so that tens of thousands of people can minutely analyse their tapes for the absence of spittle landing on Congressmen, when everyone posts their opinion every day as if the country had millions of Evans and Novaks, I have a real hard time accepting that thesis.

In general I believe private communications should stay private unless there is some public policy reason not to.

Why should the Juicebox Mafia get to decide that 400 people get to have a private conversation? And if one of those people decides to go public -- which is what happened here -- how can they complain with any seriousness?

I am a very good secret keeper. The way I do it is, I don't tell anyone stuff I want to keep secret.

I like people trying to get Fox into this. Does anyone really believe Fox is an unbiased news organization?

No, not even conservatives (maybe some do, in which case they need to reexamine their bullshit detectors). They know that it's just their own answer to the liberal bias of other networks.

Journolist is a forum for biased liberals. The difference between it and Fox is that we know who works for Fox. Who was on the list? If it was public it wouldn't matter as much, because we'd know who we were dealing with and could use our judgment about who to believe.

The root of the problem is that we don't know who was on the list, what they said, or what they did as a result. It could be that it was simply a noisy message board. Could be. But maybe not, and since we don't know we can only speculate.

The secrecy is what concerns me. Why be so secret? Like no one is going to notice a bunch of media elites talking to each other? On the internet? Why do journalists persist in demanding a level of respect and privacy that they would never grant anyone else?

Althouse - if you did get the files, I bet one of the juicier bits would be when the liberal MSM were all blessing the Dem's "deem & pass scheme". I am sure they spent a lot of 247 internet sleepover time making brownies and trying to put the right MSM spin on that bastard of an idea.

Why are you making arguments when you've just admitted that you don't know anything about it?

I care about making private information public. My bias is towards intellectual freedom. I didn't see the necessity of getting Judge Bork's video rental records, for example.

Seven Machos post reminds me of the famous German song Die Gedanken sind frei -- as long as you keep them to yourselves. But it's only by airing one's thoughts that you can decide if they're half-baked or not.

I picture the old protypical reporter's bar where the grizzled reporter has a designaed seat at the end of the bar and the customers bring him news tips and he latest scandals. The reporter's nemeses [plural?] is a corrupt City Hall, gangsters, union thieves, and of course some big business tycoons.

Today your journalists are wining and dining with the old reporter's lifelong corrupt targets, going to barbecues at the VP's house and writing story after story how Green Energy is good while his own spouse is making big big bucks GE or a windmill company.

Lastly, FLS, my reporters' bar was open to the public. That is a sharp contrast to your Journolist Bar.

But it's only by airing one's thoughts that you can decide if they're half-baked or not.

That's not what this thing was. It was an orchestrated, invitation-only attempt by people who are supposed to be reporting news to instead shape the news itself before it was reported to the hoi polloi.

If you value the freedom of information, you cannot value forums such as these.

John -- I'm not so worried about the power of the people behind this thing. It did seem to work for awhile, but reality is a pernicious thing. Your spin can only be spun for so long until the shit that is facts spews on your fan.

Really, in the long run, it works the opposite way. The Juicebox Mafia is just another liberal cocoon, where people of similar (and, in this case, similarly flaccid) intellect and persuasion can talk.

Still, on principle, 400 people in the news business should not be colluding about what to say publicly. That should strike anyone as wrong and grossly un-American.

Journolist was a conspiracy to use major corporate media for partisan political purposes..

And their master plan to carry out this conspiracy was forming an email group of over 400 people to run narrative forming ideas by each other, and continuing it after it had already been compromised? I would think just emailing each other privately without a list would be much stealthier.

I bet the emails back then would show major malfeasance by the MSM in its lovefest with candidate Obama.

There's no question that the lovefest for Candidate Obama approached surreal proportions such that there had to have been collusion. It's hard to fathom now, but back then criticizing Obama just wasn't done by right-thinking people.

As I say, though, reality is a bitch and it can't be spun for long. Ultimately, this groupthink does much more harm than good for the causes of the participants.

I also want to go on record here as saying that the archive will prove a lot less compelling than some here predict. There will be some tasty morsels, but mostly it will be what it is: a bunch of lightweights harping snarkily on the issues of the day.

It'll be a lot like these comment threads, actually, except for the lightweight part. ;]

If you were ever part of a list serve, you'd understand the efficiency.

I have an email distribution list of 200 clients I send offers to on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. It could not be easier. Select group, and send. The theory that they wanted to continue to set narrative talking points after emails were forwarded to Mickey Kaus of all people, is pretty weak.

The Kaus leak was a while ago. Maybe they thought they'd plugged it. Maybe they did.

Any defense that says people would never do something in secret because it would come out ignores the fact that scandals happen all the time. Secrets are often broken. That doesn't change the fact that they were meant to be secret.

What I see as having been pernicious here was the intentional management of the news by those who pretend to be unbiased and to report it. If candidate Obama said something that might hurt him, such as spreading the wealth around or about bitter clingers of religion and guns, they would, in unison, change the topic to Sarah Palin's family life, including who mothered what baby, who was paying for her clothes, etc. After the VP debates, they announced, again in unison, that Biden had won, while Palin looked like and idiot - and then ignored the fact that much of what Biden had said that night was pure imagination. When questions came up about Obama's credentials, the subject was changed, again, in mass, to that of the other party's VP candidate.

And, of course, it didn't stop at the election. I think that there is evidence that the coverage of the tea party movement has been as heavily managed as the presidential campaign was.

The result is that what many in America thought was the news of the day, turned out, apparently, to be contrived propaganda designed to put Obama in the White House and big majorities for the Democrats in Congress. Stories critical of their candidates were suppressed, while those critical of their opponents were sexed up and pushed.

Why would the archives be helpful? - To see whether this list was really as harmless as those involve claim, or as pernicious as those like me claim. - To see which stories were suppressed, how the topics was changed, etc. or not. - To see who is involved, and, therefore which news organizations have been compromised and the level of the compromisation.

You seriously don't think conservative pundits don't email each other, or have their own email lists? Where do you stop? Prevent journalists from having lunch with each other? Trace their phone calls? Track their blackberry transmissions? This whole spectacle to me might be the dumbest thing I've seen in a long time.

gm- Of course they do. Let me know when there is a list of 400 of them coordinating messages across different media. Then I'll say the same thing.

Remember the story about the no-name reporter in the White House press pool? He was an obvious plant to throw softball questions. Conservatives do play message games. They tend to be exposed a lot sooner than liberals because there are more liberals in the media.

Bruce -- That's all true. You make a strong case. In response, and mostly in passing, I note three things:

1. The 1994 election was very similar to the 2008 election. Bill Clinton was deified. This collusion thing has happened many times before in history and it was probably much easier when media gatekeeping existed. The Juicebox Mafia was just stupid in the way it tried to collude.

2. McCain was a terrible, terrible candidate. Even I didn't want to vote for him.

3. There is a difference, still, even though it's murky, between reporters and opinioners. Klein is definitely an opinioner and I don't think he makes any bones about it. Weigel has no case for that. I don't know about the other 398.

You said, Ann. I had posted this on your earlier thread. Yes, yes, yes. We need it accessible. First, by allowing Ezra to delete it, we have created two-tier system. If a GOP had done it, it is hello unemployment. Ezra walks free. Why no one at Media Matters or Huff Post has blog about Ezra's act has totally confused me? Your blog needs to be known everywhere.

IMHO, Journolist houses today's version of budding Walter Durantys types, all with tingles going up their legs. It'll be a shame if all newspapers die because holding a laptop while drinking coffee is froth with peril and it doesn't have the same tactile feel.

3. There is a difference, still, even though it's murky, between reporters and opinioners. Klein is definitely an opinioner and I don't think he makes any bones about it. Weigel has no case for that. I don't know about the other 398.

And that is the rub here. We know that Weigel was portrayed as a journalist and not as an opinioner. How many others? My, admittedly prejudiced, guess is quite a few. The news has just been too well orchestrated and managed during the time that this list was active.

I agree that Sen. McCain was not a very good candidate. I got on board grudgingly, seeing through, I think, the spin in favor of his opponents. But how much of McCain being a poor candidate was spin by these journalists, and how much was reality? And, of course, the opposite is also in question. How really good a candidate was Barack Obama? He said a lot of questionable things throughout the campaign that were essentially suppressed, most often by an immediate and concerted change of topic by the MSM. In other words, if the candidates had been effectively switched, would the results have been the same?

Young David Kernell just wanted to see if he could read Sarah Palin's email. And he discovered he could. But he was prosecuted for gratifying his curiosity, although convicted only for covering up his acts.

Bruce -- I don't think McCain would have beaten any Democrat. I don't think any Republican would have beaten any Democrat (within the realm of possibility). It was a Democratic year. The Republicans were spent in terms of political capital and in terms of intellectual spirit. Moreover, they had been drunk on power and had turned corrupt.

Young David Kernell just wanted to see if he could read Sarah Palin's email.

Young David Kernell committed a crime. This is why he was convicted of a crime.

These journalists have committed no crime, despite the claims of our protestethness too much of our resident leftists who can only respond by trying to pass a law to prevent behavior. But they're not fascists. Not them.

So it's a list of 400 people that make it bad? Is 300 okay? 100? Is 3 okay? Are conference calls allowed? Can they call or email each other at all?

I think that it depends on whether they are being portrayed as reporters/ journalists or opinion writers. I have no problem with opinion writers talking together.

And, I think that it depends on what organizations they are writing for, and how much of the news coming out of these news organizations is being coordinated. NYT, WaPo, LAT, AP, the alphabet networks, CNN, PMSNBC, NPR are bad, because they control so much of the upstream news. The papers in smaller cities not nearly as bad.

I'm not talking about rules. There's no crime here. People can say and do what they want on the internet.

It's a matter of information. If people with some amount of power are doing something that matters in secrecy, that might be something we want to know about. Whether it's "OK" or not depends on what happened. If they were all sharing cookie recipes no one would care. I doubt that was the case.

Like I said, if this was some other group on the internet it wouldn't matter. The comments section on Althouse probably has had a lot more than 400 people, but they are relatively powerless and also public (in what we say if not our identities).

I don't think we can, or should, legally compel answers out of a private listserv. However, I'd really like to know what happened there. Newspapers find out private things all the time without doing anything other than asking questions.

There's no real principle here other than wanting to know what our betters are up to. I think that's fine.

Althouse, I fully support the call for someone to make the Journolist archives public.

But did you happen to see that your commenters have proven in this thread on your blog (scroll way down) that more than one conservative listserv for conservative bloggers and journalists exists? We know next to nothing about these top secret conservative listservs, except a few confessions here and there that they do, in fact, exist, and that the daily postings on these listservs would be embarrassing if they were ever leaked. Shouldn't there be a call for more info about those conservative listservs, too? And for their archives?

It's odd that bigtime bloggers such as InstaPundit never seem to mention that conservative versions of Journolist exist. Are they so top secret that even Glenn Reynolds doesn't know about them? Or is he hiding their existance from us? I heard about Journolist a long time ago.....

But, yeah, see the comments section at the link and you'll see your commenters have proven they do exist.

I'd like to know more about what's going on on all these listservs, left and right. And certainly people should be aware that there are more than one conservative listservs very similar to Journolist out there. We don't even know the names of those conservative listservs, so I guess the bloggers and journalists on them are much more hardcore in their code of silence.

I don't like my information being coordinated and codified across different media. The whole point of going to different media and different writers is to get different points of view.

If the listservs really are forums for discussions and ideas, that's fine. I'm sure to some extent they are. But to the extent they are not it concerns me.

Information matters. This is exactly the sort of collusion that media uncovers in private industry and government all the time. That's fine- that's part of their job. But media deserves the same scrutiny.

Whoever exposes conservative listserves will be a liberal, and that's OK too. You get the dirt on someone from their enemies.

Garage -- You are being ridiculous. If Selma Hayek put a picture of her tits on a list serv with 400 people, and one of those 400 people forwarded the picture to someone else who then put it on a website, that's Selma Hayek's problem because Selam Hakyek would be a complete dumb ass.

You have to try harder than this. I have seen you make good arguments on occasion. It's sad that you end up in such straits as this most of the time.

Bruce -- I don't think McCain would have beaten any Democrat. I don't think any Republican would have beaten any Democrat (within the realm of possibility). It was a Democratic year. The Republicans were spent in terms of political capital and in terms of intellectual spirit. Moreover, they had been drunk on power and had turned corrupt.

You may be right, but the Democrats have always been the more corrupt party. For pretty much every GOP ethics scandal, there have been several similar, and most often more egregious, Democratic ones quietly suppressed. How else do you explain two successive Democratic Presidents having had significant ethical questions about their pasts that were essentially ignored by the press during their respective campaigns? Bill's affairs and Hillary's monetary shenanigans were known, as well as the issues about Obama's house. And, it is far worse in Congress. The difference seems to be that Republicans fire their corrupt politicians, while the Democrats promote theirs (note that picture yesterday of Frank and Dodd, both with checkered pasts, overseeing financial "reform").

Yes, it was a Democratic year. But would it have been if there hadn't been a concerted effort by the MSM to tar the Republicans as corrupt and drunk on power, while ignoring significantly more corruption on the part of the Democrats?

Ann, I think you might be overrating the efficacy of a 25-year-old Ezra Klein's efforts to get his friends to talk to each other. Lefties are famously hard to get to agree to anything, let alone coverage of major issues in a market with cutthroat competition.

I fear when you get the archive it will be very unsatisfying as an artifact of Liberal Scheming, though a fun source of juicy tidbits.

There's something that strikes me as generational about the response to JournoList. I wonder what danah boyd thinks? It seems to me like a bunch of wired millenials doing their cooperating/social learning thing. I'd be shocked if people on it weren't primarily arguing with each other, asking questions, and self-promoting.

6. The chain of command of reporter to editor needs to be restored. Journalists should not be taking any kind of direction from, or feel pressure to conform their analysis with, their peers, or feel like it's up to them to share information with them about leads, sources, angles or ultimate impact of a story. It's the editor to whom the reporter or columnist should look for guidance, period.

At least we don't confuse ends with means. From the Washington Times, September 19, 2008: "A person taking credit for hacking into Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo account claims to have read the Republican vice-presidential candidate's e-mails to find something that "would derail her campaign" after using publicly available biographical data to reset her password, according to a posting on the Internet.

Kernell wanted to read Palin's emails in the hopes of digging up some dirt. Commenters here want to read the Journolist's journalists' emails in the hopes of digging up some dirt.

I kind of doubt that anyone would have saved all of the listserv emails, because most people are not packrats, and apparently it was a high volume list. High volume lists deluge one with email -- personally I set my preferences to digest or nomail in that case.

Apparently Journolist was a google group -- subscribers could have just pointed their browsers over there to read the messages. But now it no longer exists.

FLS -- If someone hacks Google to get into this list serv, that's arguably a crime. Forwarding the information is not. It's like if you break into my house and steal stuff, it's a crime. If I give you my stuff, it's not a crime. Even if you take what I give you and give it to someone else, or copy it to the whole world, it's still not a crime.

Even if you take what I give you and give it to someone else, or copy it to the whole world, it's still not a crime.

Does copyright law mean nothing to you? Have you never seen the "FBI Warning" at the beginning of a videorecording? I'm pretty sure that "forwarding copies of my messages to Althouse" was not one of the bundle of rights that the journalist-participants granted each other.

Or are you going to argue that Althouse is a library? Because copying an entire archive of 400 people's work is not likely to be considered "fair use."

Does copyright law mean nothing to you? Have you never seen the "FBI Warning" at the beginning of a videorecording? I'm pretty sure that "forwarding copies of my messages to Althouse" was not one of the bundle of rights that the journalist-participants granted each other.

Or are you going to argue that Althouse is a library? Because copying an entire archive of 400 people's work is not likely to be considered "fair use."

The big issue in getting to criminal copyright infringement is commercial advantage or private financial gain. Plus, it is mostly limited to computer programs and motion pictures. See 17 U.S.C. § 506 for more information.

Otherwise, you just have the tort of copyright infringement, and if the creators of the works didn't promptly register their works (i.e. their emails), then they are unlikely to get either attorneys' fees or statutory damages.

And, even if that were the case, you still have the pesky problem of license. What exactly was the "license" for the listserve group? I belong to maybe a half dozen such groups, and haven't the foggiest what the terms and conditions are, or, indeed, if there are any that might affect copyright license. And note that changing them after someone has signed up is likely fruitless.

Finally, as you note, there is the aspect of Fair Use, if all else fails (ok, it may not help as a criminal defense, but that is highly unlikely anyway). There is definitely some news value in the emails, and so the 17 U.S.C. § 107 factors may lean towards Fair Use.

Let me add to my last point. It is unlikely that the posters to the listserve promptly registered their emails with the Copyright Office. And if they didn't, they likely lost statutory damages and attorneys' fees.

Both could be very significant here. Normal statutory damages are between $750 and $30k per infringement, and each email could be considered a single act of infringement. Statutory damages may be cranked to $150k per infringement for willful infringement, but reduced to $200 for innocent infringement (which under current law, and with this group of journalists, I would think impossible to prove). Attorneys' fees would likely run from $100k on up.

But here is the problem - copyright owners (essentially) need to show prior registration for attorneys' fees and statutory damages. Prevailing defendants do not. That means that if the journalists sued and lost there is a possibility that they might end up owing attorneys' fees to the other side (again, $100k on up), likely without a chance at such on their side due to not promptly registering the emails.

I kind of doubt that anyone would have saved all of the listserv emails, because most people are not packrats, and apparently it was a high volume list

Most people are not packrats? It is more work to erase e-mails than to let them sit in your inbox. Some people religiously erase, some do it half-assedly and some just wait til their administrator says they're up against a limit. Out of 400 people, my guess is at least 150 fall into the latter category. Considering the type of people on this list -- people who use their e-mail archives as one more place to be researched -- a more realistic guess is probably 300.

As a result of Sarbanes-Oxley virtually every public corporation saves its emails and IM correspondence. Even if everyone on Journolist deleted every email from his personal inbox there are as many copies out there as there are people on the list who used their work email. It might take a lawsuit to get at them, but email is, for all intents and purposes, forever.

My parents said "Walk a mile another man's moccasins before you criticize him." When I imagine myself as a member of Jounolist, one of my first reactions is to patch the leak. The person who ratted out Weigel must be found and cast into the outer darkness. Just like people sworn to secrecy by our government who leak to reporters should be tried for treason.

If you listen to Rush Limbaugh, you'll hear his montage of talking heads from TV land. It's the same thing. These mouths must talk to each other about news stories. They'll all have the same phrase, sentence, or direction that they want to peddle. And it happens all of the time.

I had a lawyer once who I wound up suing because a friend of his wanted to look into my records kept there - for buyout advantage to be sure. He let his "good old boy" look. I sued. The judge asked me what was in the records that i was not wanting to show.

My response was I asked the judge for his personal diary at home. He replied (catching on) that it was his and at home and I had no business. But, I asked, what is there to hide?

He replied that he had an undertandable expectation of privacy as those are the rules of a diary.

I replied that I had a reasonable expectation of privacy because i was paying this attorney.

Journolist made a privacy rule. Those involved had a reasonable expectation that those enrolled wouldn't be ratbastards.

My three cents worth: three rough, comforting observations about groups like this -- be they formal or informal, online or offline, liberal or conservative.

(1) The potential for real effective and pernicious coordinated activity is proportional to the size of the group (linearly or whatever).

(2) The difficulties in keeping such workings secret is also proportional to the size of the group.

The third is a different sort of observation:

(3) The moral gravity of releasing inside information is inversely proportional to the size of the group. Sharing a confidence held by six may be culpable. Sharing a confidence held by six thousand? Hardly at all.

Collusion: a secretive agreement between two or more persons to limit open competition by misleading others. It can involve "misrepresenting the independence of the relationship between the colluding parties."

"Commenters here want to read the Journolist's journalists' emails in the hopes of digging up some dirt."

I'm not looking for dirt. I'm looking for insight into how journalists self-discipline and participate in the structuring of the news that reaches the public. It's about transparency and truth. I want better journalism in the end. What we have now is pretty bad, and I would like to look into an area of possible rot.

I don't agree - though maybe they'll gain a new respect for why anyone freaks out when some journalist makes the archives of their private conversations public.

You know what they're saying about you anyway. You can feel it. What you've always suspected they are saying about you? They are. I'm always surprised how viciously rude people are about you. You're hardly a Freeper, but I guess that's the point. You should know better, theoretically.